The Warwickshire Thick once sustained 20 pits in the county that gave birth to Shakespeare and rugby.

Daw Mill, however, is the last remaining colliery mining the Warwickshire Thick coalfield, half a mile under the former pit villages north of Coventry, with seams up to eight metres wide and rich enough to make Daw Mill, above, Britain’s biggest producer for years to come.

The Daw Mill shafts were sunk in the Fifties to provide ventilation to the long since closed Kingsbury and Dexter collieries. The operations at Daw Mill, near the village of Arley, began in the early Eighties at